Mayors, regional and business leaders and other decision-makers met last week in Roskilde to develop a plan to make Copenhagen more competitive in the world marketplace. The scheme they agreed to intends to market all 46 councils and two regions in Zealand as being part of Copenhagen. Hillerød, for example, some 40ish kilometres to the north, would be called ‘Copenhagen’ to an international investor looking to set up shop.
“Global competition is brutal,” said Copenhagen mayor Frank Jensen is a statement from the City Council. “It makes sense that we come together and work together to attract investors to the region.”
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Sophie Hæstorp Andersen, head of the Region Hovedstaden, the Capital Region, agreed with Jensen.
“A Chinese investor doesn’t care that a workplace might be 70 kilometres outside of Copenhagen,” she said in the statement.
”It is all the same to them, so we need to do away with the competition between town and country and north and south and form a united metropolis.”
Falling behind
Region Hovedstaden lags far behind other European cities when it comes to attracting businesses that can generate growth and new jobs in the region. Stockholm experienced growth of nearly 5 percent from 2010 to 2012, while the Copenhagen-Malmö area grew by only 0.4% during the same period.
The goal of a united metropolis is to bring growth in Zealand on a par with the most successful metropolises in Europe.
